The Discourse of Comfort in Chinese Online Medical Consultations

This book integrates perspectives from conversation analysis (CA) and discursive psychology to shed light on doctor-patient communication in asynchronous web-based interactions through the lens of the discourse of comfort. While previous research has been done in this space on face-to-face encounters, this book seeks to bring further attention to comfort in online text interactions between doctors and patients, examining its capacity to convey emotional support, encourage “troubles-telling", and facilitate problem solving in medical encounters. A discursive psychology approach provides a complementary perspective to ethnomethodology and CA frameworks, applied to an extensive corpus with data scraping in Python. While Chinese data is featured, this integrated approach allows for a nuanced view of the differences between spoken and online interactions as well as the role of technology in the organization of talk and doctor-patient communication more broadly. This book will be valuable reading for students and scholars interested in talk-in-interaction, CA, health communication, language and health, pragmatics, and social psychology.